From Scientific American:
It is the dark force, we're told, behind the obesity epidemic, the death of the family farm and Tang. But humans have been “processing” food ever since we learned how to cook, preserve, ferment, freeze, dry or extract. Processed food has powered the evolution of the species, the expansion of empires, the exploration of space. Here are highlights
As early as 1.8 million years ago
ROASTED MEAT
Fire-kissed food is easier to digest and more nutritious than raw food is. Some anthropologists argue that cooking was the essential step that allowed early humans to develop the big brains characteristic of Homo sapiens [see “Case for (Very) Early Cooking Heats Up”].
30,000 years ago
BREAD
Agriculture began around 12,000 years ago, but early Europeans were baking bread many thousands of years before that time. In 2010 scientists found surprising evidence of starch grains on crude mortars and pestles at sites in modern-day Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic. The starches came from the roots of cattails and ferns, which early humans pounded into flour, mixed with water and baked into bread.
Bread was portable and nutrient-dense and resisted spoilage. It was also a nutritional step backward. Comparative studies show that Neolithic hunter-gatherers ate a more varied and nutritious diet than Neolithic farmers. And from the perspective of energy consumption, hunter-gatherers were far more efficient: a farmer would have to spend 10 hours to grow food with the same number of calories that six hours of foraging could provide.
Then why bother with bread at all? Anthropologists debate why farming became dominant, but one thing is certain: bread and agriculture were codependent. As societies began to rely on bread as a major foodstuff, they were also forced to expend more effort on agriculture (and vice versa).
7000 b.c.
BEER
The birth of beer is hard to place. The oldest physical evidence comes from pottery shards in Iran that date back to 3500 b.c., but archaeologists such as Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania suggest that the first ale may have been produced as early as 7000 b.c. as a by-product of bread making. Early societies quickly embraced the accident: ancient Sumerians may have diverted as much as 40 percent of all grain to beer production.
Modern-day brewers, with help from archaeologists, have attempted to re-create ancient brews. McGovern has partnered with Dogfish Head Craft Brewery to ferment ancient Egyptian and Chinese beverages, whereas Great Lakes Brewing Company, with help from researchers at the University of Chicago, is brewing beer based on a 3,800-year-old ode to the Sumerian beer goddess Ninkasi....MUCH MORE
